Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocen: One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network

Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene

One-Day Online Workshop of the Historical Fictions Research Network

The Historical Fictions Research Network, an interdisciplinary and international network of scholars examining historical fictions, i.e. narratives of the past in a variety of popular media, is happy to organise its third one-day winter workshop on the topic of “Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene”.

The ongoing environmental crisis is arguably the greatest political and social challenge of our time. Climate change dominates the political, social, cultural and academic discourses, as well as artforms such as film, video games, TV series, and literary fiction. The effect of the climate crisis on literature is illustrated by the many contemporary studies on so called “climate fiction” (sometimes “climate change fiction”) (Trexler 2015; Ghosh 2016; Bracke 2018; Mehnert 2016; Johns-Putra 2019; Andersen 2019). Others have studied how climate change and the Anthropocene challenge the way we think about history, time and narrative (Markley 2019; Chakrabarty 2021; James 2022; Hughes Warrington 2022). Still, the study of historical fiction rarely takes an ecocritical approach or examines representations of climate change or the Anthropocene in the genre. The ambition of this workshop is to open this door and explore what the emergence of the Anthropocene means for historical fiction.

Programme and timings to be confirmed. 

Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Jerome de Groot, Dorothea Flothow, Siobhan O’Connor, Stephanie Russo, Lisa Grahn.